Regionen tværs over Afrika i Saharas sydlige udkant er udsat for voldsom udtørring og klimaforandringer hæver de i forvejen høje temperaturer, så det ser sort ud, men så enkelt er det ikke, for potentialet er stort med de rette fremgangsmåder.
MAO, 16 April 2012 (IRIN): With drought conditions chronic in the Sahel, many farmers give up trying to grow crops and head to towns and cities to find work.
In Chad many go to the south or to Lake Chad where irrigation from the fast-shrinking lake is used to farm.
But some agro-ecologists say governments, donors and farmers should not abandon (opgive) agriculture in the Sahel, and despite being “very difficult”, with the right approaches, there is “huge potential” in natural regeneration (gendannelse), traditional irrigation methods, and simple alternatives such as crop diversification.
“The Sahel has enormous potential – this is a very marginal food-growing environment, so we are forced to learn how this natural system works. All we are doing is looking for the clues (fingerpeg) in nature,” said Tony Rinauld, a research and development adviser on natural resources to World Vision Australia.
He worked in the Sahel for 19 years, practicing agro-forestry, a traditional land-use system that combines trees or other woody perennials (flerårige vækster) with crop and animal production.
The Kanem and Bahr el Ghazal regions in western Chad are chronically food insecure, and periodically experience acute malnutrition rates above the emergency threshold (tærskel).
According to NGOs, rates reached 19 percent in Kanem earlier in 2012 and many families have already run out of food and are down to one or two goats.
Many fertile oasis
Both regions are dotted with fertile oases, known as ‘wadis’, that have for years been left by their traditional ‘owners’ – the aristocrats, or ‘Sultanate’, and village chiefs – to grow little more than date palms, lemon and mango trees.
Vegetables are systematically grown in just 100 of Kanem’s 500 wadis, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
FAO runs a project with the European Union (EU) humanitarian funder, ECHO, to help the poorest families grow vegetables in 120 oases across Kanem and Bahr el Ghazal.
“Here in Kanem one crisis just flows into the next one… but we are trying to keep people here and to see how we can enlarge the wadis further,” said Abdul Karim, FAO’s food security head in Mao, the capital of Kanem.
Sultanates and village chiefs lend (udlejer) the oases to separate producer committees of men and women for 5 to 10 years, while FAO helps build a water point and provides the pump, gives farmers seeds and tools and trains them in market gardening.
Minder Mohamed Ali was guarding fields of lettuces (salathoveder), carrots, aubergines and onions in Aloum 2 wadi, 8km from Mao. “We eat some, we sell some of the vegetables – many farmers were not able to do much before this, as they have had no production this year,” he told IRIN.
“Now we see vegetables in the market every day,” the representative of the Sultanate in Mao, ni Alifeh Mahadi Alifey Mahlabtra, told IRIN.
“It is also a motivation for people to do something… we will [probably] renew the contract in five years – we want people to get enough food,” he said. “Before, people here grew rice, now we are completely dependent on our wadis.”
“Anything is possible”
With the right level of investment and the right approach, anything is possible, said Augustin Ilunga, head of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Mao, which has for decades been helping to keep severely malnourished children alive.
“In a desert landscape like this, with climate change, it will take a lot of work to change… but with the right attitude it is possible. Otherwise we will be here giving Plumpy’Nut [a highly nutritious foodstuff given to malnourished people] forever,” he told IRIN.
Ultimately, this project has worked only because land was made available to the very poorest groups, who ordinarily would not have had access to it, said Remy Courcier, Emergency coordinator at the FAO in the capital, N’djamena. “Land ownership and land rights are central to improving prospects in the Sahel.”
Courcier told IRIN that investors in Chad should follow other Sahelian examples.
“Here in Chad not much has been done over the past 30 years, but in Niger there is lots of research into improved seed varieties, traditional irrigation, environmental protection such as controling sandy dunes (sandflugt) – we could use more of this.”
Learning from Niger
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95258/CHAD-NIGER-Is-sustainable-agriculture-possible-in-the-Sahel
